An anonymous reader writes: I am a contractor and have a client who I have been with for the past 20 years, consulting under my corporate entity. At times I have had employees whom I employed at the client, but for the most part I've been at it alone. During this time I have developed many applications for the client. We have a very happy relationship. I have a lot of leeway and my word goes far. Recently, however, I have been involved to some great extent in some work that is on the frontier of some of the emerging technologies. My client has been to national meetings and everyone is wondering how they can get a copy of the product. Even the client is wondering how they can make the application into a marketable product and make money off of it. I don't mind all this, since I understand that my company was hired under a "contractor" agreement, which basically made the product work-for-hire. I am, however, wondering if my company shouldn't be taking a bigger piece of the pie than it's entitled to. I am not asking for any royalties, or any interest in any money that may come out of the product I have helped develop. I am wondering if I should be asking for some recognition on development of this and other applications I have developed at the client. Just a mention that so and so company has helped us develop this product would be sufficient, in the hope that the name recognition may spur some additional business for me, helping me to grow my company. I am really not afraid to walk away from this lucrative relationship I have had for the past 20 years. True that I have a lot of freedom in what I do, but I can easily land a job making 80% of what I'm making as a consultant plus benefits.

The question I have is whether it is unusual or reasonable to ask for any sort of recognition if I'm a general contractor developing applications.

whoever57 writes: A man was arrested at Oakland airport and charged with having bomb-making materials. The materials? An ornate watch and extra insoles in his boots. Despite the bomb squad determining that there was no bomb, the spokesman for the Alameda county sherriff's department claimed that he was carrying "potentially dangerous materials and appeared to have made alterations to his boots, which were unusually large and stuffed with layers of insoles". Linked in has a profile for a person with a matching name that (Geoffrey McGann) who is the owner and creative director of a media production company called Generator Conten

Frosty Piss writes: According to Eric Raymond, 'RMS made an early decision to frame his advocacy as a moral crusade rather than a pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes. While he made consequentialist arguments against closed source (and still does) his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like “evil”, to the point where he repeatedly alienated potential allies both with his absolutism and his demand that anyone cooperating with him share it.' Raymond goes on to say, 'By the late 1990s, after having observed RMS’s behavior for more than a decade, I had long since concluded that the Free Software Foundation’s moralistic rhetoric was serving us badly. The problem with it is the same problem with messianic religions in general; for people who are not flipped into true-believer mode by any given one, it will come off as at best creepy and insular, at worst nutty and potentially dangerous (and this remains true even for people attached to a different messianic religion).'

lsllll writes: I got drawn (without my intention) into three 20 minute sessions, talking to high school students about computer science and programming, and am wondering what are some of the things I should talk to them about. I have previously done the same thing for a forty minute period, and all the students wanted to talk about game programming. My only game programming experience dates back to the late 80's and programming a few games (some which ran on top of Novell's network) in Turbo Pascal. Since then I have done lots of database design, web interface programming, and systems configuration and integration. I am pretty fluent with Windoze and Linux, but my contemporary programming skills are somewhat limited to Coldfusion, PHP, Javascript, SQL and bash scripts. Should I talk to them about different aspects of computer science, what it's like to work full-time in the computer industry, or do I make the sessions just question and answer, since 20 minutes might not allow me to talk and do question and answer?